My path had taken me over dead bodies, through a thicket of lies and misdirection. I had defied the attempts to throw me off the road. Finally, as the poet Mr Robert Browning might have said, Childe Harry to the dark tower came.
The cat stopped two paces behind me. There was no bell or door knocker, so I gave a peremptory rap as I would for a defaulting debtor. I listened and knocked again. No reply.
I kicked squarely at the height of the lock. The hinges must have been rusted because they gave way along with the dead bolt. The whole thing toppled inwards with an empty boom.
Inside, there was no sign of life except for an oil lantern hanging from a hook. The building consisted of a single, medium-sized room, the centre of which was occupied by a low platform of brick. It was a workshop with a solid chimney for a furnace or oven, a high ceiling, and beams overhead.
I went looking for entrances to concealed tunnels and found nothing. The bare stone floor was flat and smooth. There was not the least sign of a hairline crack to give away an opening. There were no currents of air and no spots that sounded hollow. I spent fifteen minutes searching in this fashion.
The room was not large, and I had circled it three times when the cat came in. It walked to one side of the brick platform, sat down, and wrapped its tail round its feet. The cat gave a single, low meow, the way cats do when they wish a door to be opened for them.
“What do you want?” I stopped dead.
The cat was sitting in front of a round iron manhole cover. I could not have failed to see it before.
I had walked over that exact spot not a minute previously, and I would swear on a Bible that the manhole had not been there earlier. But there it was, as real and solid as anything.
It was not too hard to lever it open with a piece of scrap metal. Below was a sheer cylindrical drop of ten feet. Iron rungs driven into the brick walls made a ladder. I unhooked the oil lantern and lowered myself, watched by the cat. The first few feet of bricks were crude and uneven. After that, they were flat and red like the old Roman bricks in London Wall.
This truly was a descent into madness. I have never suffered from that morbid terror of confined spaces known as claustrophobia, but when I reached the bottom rung and saw that the manhole was invisible above me, I felt something very like it.
I was in a narrow corridor with an arched ceiling and damp stone walls—old stone, I could tell. The floor was worn into a channel from who knew how many centuries of walking feet.
“Meredith, we’re in,” I whispered to myself, as though the old joke was a protective spell.
A faint light glimmered ahead from another oil lantern such as the one I held. I walked towards it.
After thirty feet, the corridor opened into a roughly circular chamber with arched entranceways leading into darkness.
One side was a sort of study with a folding table and a single wooden chair with a coat over the back of it. All around were piles of books with places marked in them with slips of paper. There was an oil lamp on a hook, and a lit candle on the table. I felt the seat of the chair and found it warm.
In the middle of the room was a circular stone wall ten or twelve feet across and a foot high, studded with stone posts; it opened into a pit below. A wooden ladder was propped up beside it. There was not a single sound.
“Mr D’Onston,” I said in as firm a voice as I could manage—my debt-collecting voice. “Or rather, Mr Robert D’Onston Stephenson. I might call you Howard Phillips. though you’ve no right to the name.”
I expected him to step out of the shadows at any moment but saw nothing but a slight movement down in the pit. I wondered again if I might have come too late.
“You should properly be dead. You’ve no right still to be walking this Earth and certainly not in a body stolen from another man—a foolish young man, whose only crime was that he was too easily entranced by your stories. Your lies, in fact. He brought you back from the dead. You repaid him by tricking him into an exchange of bodies.”
I had put down the oil lamp and was moving around stealthily as I spoke, my words echoing between the stone walls. The blue charm was clutched in my fist.
“You were convincing enough as long as you kept your mouth shut. But I don’t think you know a tenth as much about Palingenesis as Howard, and it showed. Also, you talked about what Yeats and Madame Blavatsky talked about in Maycot as though you were there. And when you came to talk to me in the pub, I saw through you in a minute.”
I had hoped that I could goad him into revealing himself. Roslyn was an arrogant man and not one to stay silent when he was being attacked. I peeked through one of the arches and saw the gleam of glassware.
“Now you’re tired of being him. You don’t like being a short, pudgy man with weak eyes. You want to be yourself again. But Howard was an amateur and made a botched job of restoring your carcass, so you want to put it right.”
I was not sure whether it was a trick of the dim light, but some of the walls seemed to be carved with reliefs of grotesque figures, somewhere between human and animal. The shadows were distracting, but I kept focused, looking and listening for the slightest movement.
“You tried to kill Yang at the séance, but you bungled that one.”
“Help.”
The high-pitched voice was faint and tremulous but unmistakable. It came from the pit, of course.
After looking over my shoulder in both directions, I heaved the rickety old ladder and lowered it into the pit. I could not see inside until I brought an oil lamp over. The drop was about ten feet, and what I had taken for a pit was in fact an opening onto another level below with more arched doorways leading away from a central chamber. The ground was littered with bones, mainly mutton and beef with some pork. The place had that familiar butcher smell of meat and blood. The only other object of note was an earthenware bowl full of water, like a dog bowl. Oddly, there were no flies.
I took the ladder steps carefully. They were unsteady, and I half expected the rungs to give way under my weight. I stopped after each step, looking up and down, ready for an attack at any moment. None came, and I stepped onto the stone floor. Still moving slowly, I picked up the ladder and lay it on its side. I did not want someone hauling it up from above and leaving me down here.
Watching me with wide eyes was little Chun Hua, the Chinese Spring Flower.
Roslyn wanted human flesh and blood to restore his corpse to full humanity, and not from just any source. No, he had gone back to the oldest requirement of all: he had to have the blood of a virgin princess. Chun Hua was that “necessary element for a successful outcome” in the letter that Yang’s people had intercepted and that had so alarmed the Wu brothers.
Chun Hua’s hands were tied above her head. The cord passed through a hole cut through a stone protuberance. As though it had been made for sacrificial victims when chamber was sculpted out of the bedrock.
“Don’t worry,” I said in a low voice, swinging the lantern around as I looked in all directions. “I’m here now.”
“Shhh,” she warned.
The bones on the floor were well chewed and picked clean of meat, and there were a lot of them.
Looking over my shoulder, I pulled at the ends of the cord that bound Chun Hua. After some resistance, it came free. It was a long cord, perhaps a washing line. She stepped away, rubbing her wrists. She did not seem to have been harmed.
“Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. I led her back to where I had descended, and I stood the ladder up again. Chun Hua did not climb it but suddenly pointed past me into the darkness. Something moved, far back in the shadows, scuffling on the stone floor.
“Howard?” I asked tentatively. “My name is Harry Stubbs.”
There was no reply, but I sensed I was being watched from the darkness.
“I know what you have suffered. I mean you no harm.”
My plan, such as it was, involved catching D’Onston and compelling him to return Howard to his proper body while D’Onsto
n reoccupied his own resurrected remains. I had assumed that Howard would be a willing participant in this operation.
I put the lantern down slowly. “I’ve come to help.”
Even as he approached from out of the murk, well before I could see him clearly, I wondered whether I had misjudged the situation. He moved more like a panther prowling towards a tethered goat than a friend, and in the last two steps, when the lamplight caught him, I knew that everything was wrong.
I don’t know anything about the inner workings of Palingenesis or what had caused it to go so far wrong. The lamp revealed an enormous, shambling figure that looked like a reflection in a fairground mirror or a distorted human shape seen through wavy glass. He was more a monster than a man. But at first, the only things that struck me about him were the size of him and, as I saw his face, the utter insanity in those eyes.
There was no reason, no sense, no spark of human recognition—only the look, perhaps, of a starving man presented with a plate of roast beef. With an inarticulate cry, he reached out for Chun Hua with one misshapen hand.
After that, things happened quickly. My recollections are a collage of vivid fragments that I have pieced together as best I may. What follows would not satisfy any serious commentator on the art of pugilism, but it is the most accurate I can manage.
Chun Hua screamed shrilly. I took hold of the monster’s wrist—as thick as my biceps—as he reached for her, and I pushed it away.
He was so focused on the girl that he had hardly noticed me. It took him a second to react. If I had been quicker, I might have done something more decisive at that moment, but I still had hopes of avoiding a fight.
He struck at me with his other hand; I blocked it. He inexpertly flailed, breaking my grip on his wrist, and we sprang apart. We squared up to each other. The monster focused on me for the first time; the two halves of his face did not seem to join up properly. He peeled his lips back in a snarl, revealing too-big teeth.
He was big, the biggest I ever fought. When he stepped forward, I was in his shadow, and it was like having a storm cloud towering over me. It was not his size, though, but his jerky, insect-like movements and his horrible parody of a human form that sent cold fear through me. I slipped my hands quickly into the knuckle-dusters.
He was not in any sort of defensive posture, and I loosed a straight left to his midsection. The monster just let out a little huff, and that was all. It was like punching the heavy bag, or a side of beef; his flesh was that unyielding. I had my first inkling that, contrary to appearances, this was not a living thing. He was animated by some force other than normal vitality, and it would take more than usual effort to knock him down.
He moved as smartly as a living man, though, and when he hit me back with his oversized fist, the blow caught my shoulder. The force of the impact almost overbalanced me.
I skipped back, and his next two blows stirred the air. I moved better than most boxers my size, and there was plenty of room for me to circle round and keep away as the monster tried to close to striking distance.
The knuckle-duster is a much-misunderstood item of weaponry. To the uninitiated, it is just a set of brass rings that you wear over your fingers, and the popular belief is that all the effect comes from striking your opponent with metal rather than bare knuckles. If that were really the case, you’d break your fingers when you used them.
Real brass knuckles have a T-shaped extension that fits snugly into your palm, transferring the force of the blow into your hand rather than your fingers. You can hit much harder than you can with unprotected fingers.
In addition, a knuckle-duster gives weight to the blow. Weighted gloves are a notorious topic in boxing circles. I’ve sat through many an argument about whether Jack Dempsey had plaster of Paris on his hands when he won the title in ’19 or, even more improbably, had an iron spike inside his glove. Even the extra few ounces of a little plaster make a big difference. With a pair of solid twelve-ounce brass knuckle-dusters, I could take on Jack Dempsey or any other boxer with padded gloves. They are classed as a deadly weapon and rightly so.
After the incident with the Chinese wrestler, I had carried them and had practiced using them a couple of times. That saved my life in the underground chamber. The monster came forward, both hands stretched out towards me. In the poor light, I couldn't judge distance accurately. I did not stop to consider that one false move would see me dead. I stepped in and delivered a combination, left-right-left-right, against his chest and abdomen. One blow was fouled by his arm, but the others all connected with the solid thud of a sledgehammer on wood.
I fell back as one hand right hand caught hold of my coat. He pulled me into a clumsy but extraordinarily powerful left hook. It was like being hit by a tram, and I momentarily lost consciousness. Luckily, the coat tore as I fell backwards; otherwise, he would have kept hitting me, and that would have been the end of Harry Stubbs.
I stumbled back into the wall but somehow kept my feet. I did not know where I was or what was happening, but I knew I was in a fight, and I could see enough to throw out the next combination, high and low.
His mouth was open, and white fragments showered from his teeth where the metal had struck. His head went back—as well it might; the blow was strong enough to crack the skull of any normal human—and I pressed on with a series of simple jabs, left or right, to get through whatever guard he had.
A pale shape moved upwards at the edge of my vision—Chun Hua disappearing over the top of the ladder. The monster kept pressing forward, and I had to keep circling around until I found myself cornered and had to back through an archway into pitch darkness. The only light was from the archway. From the echoes of my hobnail boots on the stone floor, I knew it was a spacious chamber, but my only concern was to get past the thing and back to the pit.
The absence of light did not trouble the thing I was fighting, and he moved directly towards me. In the deep gloom, I saw that his skin was faintly phosphorescent like a corpse glow or the light from a radium clock face.
He was not so light on his feet, and when I feinted left and darted right, he was wrong-footed enough for me to slip past like a schoolboy evading a clumsy beadle.
I dashed through to the pit, but I doubted I had enough lead to get up the ladder before he grabbed at my ankles. Instead of climbing, I turned and, in a moment of inspiration, dropped low as he rushed towards me.
I caught him low about the waist and, using his own momentum and my strength, heaved him up and over, not as neatly as the wrestler had thrown me but just as effectively. He crashed down like the proverbial ton of bricks. Unlike the wrestler, I was ready to take advantage when he landed with one arm outstretched. I jumped on his elbow, full force with both feet and all my weight and with the stone floor beneath. Going for the weak points. The impact would have snapped the arm of a living man like a dry stick, but the monster barely reacted.
As he raised himself on his other arm, I gave his head a mighty kick that laid him flat. Hoping it would take him a minute to recover, I turned to the ladder.
The ladder was gone. I was trapped with the monster.
I looked left and right, thinking I had got turned around, but the ladder had been pulled up.
The monster was stirring, heaving himself into a sitting position. I stepped over and gave him a roundhouse punch that would have embarrassed my trainer but was just the thing against a dazed opponent, and it put him back down again. Knuckle-duster notwithstanding, the blow left my hand singing.
He would not stay down for long. Nothing I could do would inflict any real damage on the thing. With a decent cleaver, I might have been able to do more, but not with bare hands.
The ladder was gone, but the length of cord that had bound Chun Hua was still there, at least twelve feet of it. The pit was barely ten feet deep. Doubling the cord over, I took the best run up I could, and, jumping high, succeeded in looping it over one of the balustrades above. I dangled for a second, my feet a foot above the ground, then awk
wardly hauled myself up.
As I did so, I was all too aware that D’Onston was above me, the monster was below me, and there was no telling which was more dangerous. My main preoccupation was stopping the doubled rope from slipping through my fingers and wondering how high I was above the ground.
Behind and below me, the animate corpse gave a howl—and I felt his hand tighten on my foot and drag me down. The cord tightened like a bowstring.
The next thing I knew, my foot had slipped out of the boot, and I was scrambling upwards like a monkey up a palm tree, pulling myself onto the floor at the upper level while the monster howled behind me.
Chun Hua stood there in her white dress; then I saw that she was being held. Howard had her two wrists firmly in one hand. He looked down at me with amused contempt.
“May I ask how you discovered my retreat?” he asked.
“It’s a long story,” I said, getting up slowly, a little battered and awkward on one bare foot, but sound enough. I felt for the charm Arthur had given me and realised I had dropped it somewhere in the pit.
He looked at me.
The human gaze is a funny thing. You can feel the pressure of it when someone is watching you, even from behind. There is a certain electricity when you look into another’s eyes. My belief is that the evil eye is nothing but an extension of the same effect, a sort of sympathetic influence turned bad. It crosses the gulf between individuals and allows the mind of one to wreak havoc on the body of another.
Looking into D’Onston’s eyes was like looking up at the mouth of a well as I fell slowly down it, gently as thistledown. At the same time, I felt myself exhaling forcefully through no volition of my own, as though my breath was propelling me away, and all my vitality was flowing out into the air.
I did not have a clue how to fight it. I tried to wave my arms, move my legs, turn my head away, but I was completely disconnected from my own body. D’Onston had charge of the whole engine, and he knew the way to shut it down. If only I could shut my eyes or will myself blind to cut off that stare.
Broken Meats: A Harry Stubbs Adventure Page 11
